This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Marijuana is not medicine! As journalists, you cannot make inaccurate or false statements and then get a pass. You made a false and misleading claim in your editorial Nov. 12 "Time for Utah to rethink medicinal cannabis."
Your statement "There is a growing body of disciplined, peer-reviewed medicinal marijuana research with double-blind studies that meet the standards of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration" is untrue. Yes there is a lot published about marijuana, cannabis, or cannabinoid extracts. But none of these studies have consistently used the same plant, extract or dose of the same cannabinoid in a defined disease state and measured an outcome that is consistently meaningful.
In the U.S., we demand the highest standards of research to prove that the medicines our doctors prescribe are safe and reasonably effective. You claim this is the case for marijuana, but you have not shown readers the evidence to support that claim. You must have high quality, reproducible, scientifically valid research to call something medicine. In the U.S., snake oil is not medicine, and neither is marijuana.
Chris Stock, Pharm.D.
Salt Lake City